Dompletion: DOM-aware JavaScript code completion

Abstract

JavaScript is a scripting language that plays a prominent role in modern web applications. It is dynamic in nature and interacts heavily with the Document Object Model (DOM) at runtime. These characteristics make providing code completion support to Java- Script programmers particularly challenging. We propose an auto- mated technique that reasons about existing DOM structures, dynamically analyzes the JavaScript code, and provides code completion suggestions for JavaScript code that interacts with the DOM through its APIs. Our automated code completion scheme is implemented in an open source tool called DOMPLETION. The results of our empirical evaluation indicate that (1) DOM structures exhibit patterns, which can be extracted and reasoned about in the con- text of code completion suggestions; (2) DOMPLETION can pro- vide code completion suggestions with a recall of 89%, precision of 90%, and an average time of 2.8 seconds.